Bomb suspects asked about U.S. work

2 doctors considered taking test for entry

July 07, 2007|By Alan Cowell and Scott Shane, The New York Times News Service

LONDON — Two of the doctors arrested in connection with the bungled London and Glasgow car bomb attacks had made preliminary inquiries about practicing medicine in the United States, an American law-enforcement official said Friday.

The official confirmed a report in The Philadelphia Inquirer that the doctors had contacted the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, a non-profit organization in Philadelphia that screens foreign citizens wishing to train or work as doctors in the United States.

Nancy O'Dowd, a spokeswoman for the FBI, said one of them "was applying" for approval to practice in the United States. "But we don't believe he took the test," she told The Associated Press.

The law-enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation in Britain, said investigators had found no evidence that any of the eight people arrested in the case had ever been in the United States.

In London on Friday, an Iraqi doctor, Bilal Abdullah, became the first to be charged since Britain was plunged into its newest terrorism alert one week before, when police discovered two Mercedes sedans in London packed with nails, gasoline and gas canisters. Abdullah, 27, was identified as one of the two men who drove a Jeep Cherokee into a check-in terminal at Glasgow's airport and set the vehicle afire.

The second man, identified as Khalil Ahmed, was badly burned in the attack and was moved for clinical reasons from the Royal Alexandra hospital near Glasgow to a special burn unit in the city's infirmary, medical authorities said Friday.

British authorities have said they suspect the two men set the failed car bombs in London and then raced 400 miles back to the Glasgow area and worked frantically to carry out the airport attack before the police closed in.

Abdullah was seen in amateur television footage being led away by police officers as the Jeep Cherokee went up in flames. The Crown Prosecution Service ruled that he should be charged with "conspiracy to cause explosions following incidents in London and Glasgow on June 29, 2007, and 30 June, 2007."

The charge, brought under a law dating to 1883, accused him of conspiring "with others to cause explosions of a nature likely to endanger life or cause serious injury." It carries a maximum life sentence. The police said Abdullah would be arraigned Saturday.

The investigation widened in Australia as well, where the police last week detained Mohammed Haneef, 26, who had worked in Britain and was seeking to fly to his native India when he was arrested. On Friday, authorities questioned and released five more Indian doctors and raided two hospitals in a search for evidence on computers, the Australian police said.

Citing federal law-enforcement officials, NBC News reported Friday that Haneef was one of the two doctors who inquired about practicing medicine in the United States. The other was Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha, 26, a Jordanian born in Saudi Arabia, who was arrested last week in Britain.

Foreign nationals or American graduates from foreign medical schools accounted for more than 228,665 of the 902,053 practicing physicians in the United States in 2005 -- about 25 percent, according to the American Medical Association.

How many practicing physicians in the United States are Muslims is hard to say. The Islamic Medical Association of North America in Lombard, Ill., has 3,500 members, but the total is likely to be several times that number.

In Britain, there is a similar reliance on foreign doctors, particularly in the government-run National Health Service. Of the nearly 239,000 doctors registered with Britain's General Medical Council, about 90,000 qualified outside its borders.

Abdullah, who had been working as a junior doctor under supervision in a diabetes ward at Royal Alexandra Hospital, was one of at least seven doctors arrested in connection with the attacks. They included two trainee doctors, ages 25 and 28, from the same hospital.